Traffic congestion has reached crisis levels in most major cities throughout the U.S. and is becoming a major problem in smaller cities and rural areas as well. Not only is traffic congestion a source of frustration for commuters, this congestion is also costly and a significant contributor to air pollution. The Texas Transportation Institute's 2001 Urban Mobility Report estimates that the total congestion costs for 68 U.S. urban areas from New York City down to those cities with populations of 100,000 is $78 billion, which was the value of 4.5 billion hours of delay and 6.8 billion gallons of excess fuel consumed. From 1982 to 1999, the time that travelers wasted in traffic increased from 12 hours to 36 hours per year.
Research has shown that meaningful travel information can reduce commute times by 13% and demand for traffic data is growing exponentially. A recent Gallup study showed that nearly 30% of all commuters and through travelers are willing to pay $1 to $5 per use and nearly 50% of commercial vehicle operators are willing to pay $10 per month; however, the data is simply not available.
Currently, transportation agencies collect highway traffic data from radar devices, video cameras, roadside sensors, and other hardware requiring expensive field installation and maintenance. Transportation agencies currently spend more than $1 billion per year for traffic monitoring systems covering less than 10% of our national highway system. Data is delivered to a Traffic Management Center (TMC) via high-speed fiber-optic communications where it is organized, analyzed, and then delivered to the public by overhead or roadside message boards, Department of Transportation Web sites, and through partnerships with radio, television, and other media outlets. This hardware-oriented field equipment approach to collecting traffic data and providing information is costly and is practical in select urban areas only.
An emerging concept is the idea of using a Global Positioning System (GPS) device to determine a series of positions of mobile communication devises and transmit these data via a wireless network to a central computer processor. The processor can then calculate the speed and direction of the device for use in determining traffic flow. While this approach can give very accurate information for a small number of devices, any attempt to gather positioning information from a large number of devices will use up large amounts of scarce bandwidth from the wireless network and prove to be very costly. Additionally, GPS data is not available for most of the wireless networks operating today. Although some nationwide trucking companies have GPS location devices in their trucks, these vehicles represent a small fraction of the number of vehicles using the roadways.
While most wireless telephony networks do not have GPS data capabilities, they do have a vast infrastructure of communication facilities. These facilities generate data routinely to enable the system to properly function, e.g., to enable cellular phone users to place and receive calls and stay connected to these calls as they move though the cell sectors of a system. Examples of these data include call detail records (CDR), handover messages, and registration messages.
In September of 1999, the FCC ordered wireless carriers to begin selling and activating phones that could be located to within 100 meters in the event of a 911 call. This requirement is referred to as Enhanced or Phase II 911. Phase II 911 is not expected to be fully implemented until 2005. This system uses GPS or signal characteristics to locate the cellular phone. Regardless of the process used, limited network capacity makes it impractical to monitor traffic using this capability as the primary source of location data.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for a traffic information system that is capable of using data types generated routinely by wireless telephony communication networks that can be extracted from the wireless network's infrastructure without adversely affecting the performance of the wireless system or taxing the networks' resources.